Re: [squid-users] banner ads (again?)

On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 05:40:11PM -0700, Mike Hoskins wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, notgonna tellya wrote:
>
> > Try squidGuard, at www.squidguard.org. I am using
> > squidGuard to redirect a list of sites that contain
> > banner ads and porn to a company logo on an internal
> > http server.
>
> I had seen SquidGuard previously... But do not want to add another layer
> of abstraction to do what I know Squid is capable of.
>
> I received a reply off-list indicating how to set this up with ACLs. I.e.

The problem with blocking ads using ACL's is the sheer number of them, and
the dynamic nature of them. Sure, you could tweak acls all day long to block
banner adds and reload squid every time you tweak them, but it is a loosing
battle.

A far better way is to take advantage of one of the public "ads databases"
full of regex's that are contributed to by many people and to which you can
contribute. These are a sort of web equivalent of the various spam databases.

With pyredir I include a script that fetches a database from upstream,
generates a config file, and signals the redirectors to reload them. This
has been running flawlessly every night with no further input from me for
years. The database I use is the adzap one, which includes not only banner
adds, but java popups etc. Adzap and pyredir can be found at;

http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/adzap/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/pyredir/

Do not think of redirectors as "adding another layer of abstraction", think
of them as another little tool to do a special little job. It was a wise
decision to allow squid to use an external tool for this job rather than try
to implement all that functionality within squid.

Because ACL's are in the config file and squid hickups a bit every time it
is asked to reload it's config, it is not wise to be dynamicly modifying the
config file and signaling squid to reload all the time. Redirectors on the
other hand can be modified on the run. For example, one thing I was
considering for pyredir was a "learning" redirector that watched the pattern
of requests and learned things like mirror locations, redirecting requests
to the fastest mirror.

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